(For you that have used Virtual ANS for a while now will already be familiar with the first section of this post but there will be something interesting later on that may trigger some new ideas...)

So what is important in an image to be usable? First of all the image fed to Virtual ANS is transformed into black, white and grey so whatever color is in the image have no importance except as information of the shade of grey. Black being the total silence - white being full on "white noise". So to make something exciting out of an image it is fundamental to have some contrast and not too much light areas as it will be just white noise especially if it is light areas from top to bottom. There is ways around this that can help and that is to try different combinations of the commands "invert" and "contrast". Another command that can help a lot to soften the sound is the blur function that can go vertical and horizontal and the reverb.These functions can be implemented in areas selected which can be really useful...So to conclude this section is that for an image to have some more excitement to it, it is important that it has more darker areas and contrasts preferably with smaller parts in high contrast.

One thing that confused me when starting to use images was that the processor of my device could not deal with some images and this was even on a moderately strong PC just giving of a lot of crackling noise. If this happens it has to do with the resolution of the image which is high on a lot of images being taken nowadays. So you have to lower the resolution of the image.Or another idea is to if you are using your telephone as a camera is to use two camera applications and set one to a lower resolution. At the same time if the resolution is too low there will be less resolution to the sound which could be desirable but personally prefer to be able to degrade the sound later if wanted. So guess a good idea is to stay somewhere in between 200 kb to 1 mb or so. Depending on the strength of your device / Computer.

So think that covers the basics of image using and now will just talk about some different ideas and finish this post with some examples...

As Virtual ANS is based on image and drawing one thing that is great and fascinating is that the music is totally in the image. Meaning that when you export what you are working on into JPEG or PNG it will sound exactly the same if you import it again!This also goes for the sound, if you export a Wav file and import it it will recreate the image.To ponder this for a while and what it means makes my head reel.(As you may have noticed a lot of the thinking that went into the developers other application Pixivisor is being applied into Virtual ANS. or the other way round as he did a PC version Visual ANS many years ago that was less advanced... hmmm.)

One thing that is good with having Virtual ANS in your portable device is that you can take photographs and open them up directly in Virtual ANS.

You can also use a lot of applications that exists for creating images-There is a lot of applications that creates Fractals which can be very rewarding some similar ones are "fluid" creating apps I used one that is for free called Fleya and some of the results are very good so in this way you can fast generate a lot of images to try out that will be useful.

Another way to create more useful images is to use photo applications that can cartoonize your images as they clarify contrasts and lets you manipulate different parameters fast.

Well there is so many different image manipulators now but one that could be interesting is Deco sketch which in so many different ways can geometrize images in very intricate ways.

Pixel art applications are an interesting way to create images as it is like you would be programming a sequencer.

Use paper and pen / ink / paint scan or photograph. In this way you can so to speak draw notes and events. If you use squared paper it can be controlled in the same way that if you use a pixelart application / program but with the added organic feeling.Remember to use the command "invert" with the sliders amount and mix set to 100% if you are using white paper and are not covering a lot of it.

So for the final section will present three different examples on how you can use images.

First one is just how I taken an image and started to fuck around building up a soundscape.The first image is the original the second is the manipulated one...

This one is a way to show one way to create "real" music from an image-What got did to the image of a fractal is that all the frequencies in between the notes got cut out of half of the image leaving the rest. This sound example is without any manipulation at all it is just the image except cutting out some of the low and high frequencies directly in the image. So from here there is of course millions of options to continue as you can copy and paste, add effects etc.But what is interesting is that if you create harmonies / melodies in this way you will have unpredictable variations in the sound because of the fluctuations in the image.

This last one is just an example how you can cut up an image to create a rhythmic pumping effect. Perfect if you want to create machine like ambiences that can be controlled in BPM.If you also do it a little bit sloppily it will have a more natural feel to it...The sound is totally unprocessed and what you hear is just the image that has been cut without anything more done to it. The image is taken from a satellite called Clementine and is a composite of photographs of the moon .To just use Virtual ANS in this capacity is good enough in itself as an application as it is hard to have such controlled and at the same time alive ambient rhythm if that is what is needed as a part of a track or a film.

(Remember that when you render the sound to go to the settings and adjust the Hz and to change to stereo to have a better quality sound...)